When I say don’t ever hire your friends, I would like to clarify something first. If you enjoy your friendship with these individuals, you might not ever want to hire them. You could find yourself with more problems than you ever imagined.

I have known too many people who hired their friends for some type of home repair or even worse than that, a home remodeling project, only to find out that their friendship wasn’t tough enough to make it through the nightmare.

Just imagine this for a moment, you hire your best friends son to do some plumbing work on your home, because they’re licensed plumbers and have been in the plumbing business for over 20 years. You know these people personally and have heard nothing but great things about them, so why wouldn’t you want to hire them.

Just bear with me for a moment, the plumbing contractor who is your best friends son, has just given you a $14,000 estimate to re-pipe your home. You can’t believe your eyes, your neighbor just got their entire house re-piped for $4500. You tell your best friends son that you’re not interested in using him and that there are no hard feelings, but the reality is you can’t believe what just happened.

You hire the other contractor and there aren’t any problems, but in the back of your mind you’re still wondering why your best friend’s son tried to gouge you. If you’re the kind of person who lets every small thing bothered them, make sure that you never even think about hiring one of your friends, but if you’re the kind of person who understands that one contractor charges more money than another contractor, you could probably work with one of your friends.

If I was going to give anyone any advice, who was seriously thinking about hiring one of their friends, it would simply be too, treat them like professionals and pretend like they’re not your friends, while they’re working on your home. I don’t want you to ignore these people or mistreat them, just treat them like any other home repair contractor.

The worst thing that you could do is to tell your friends how much money you paid them, over and over again, until they’re sick and tired of even coming over to your home. I once knew a guy who went out and bought a brand-new boat after working on one of the apartment complexes that I was remodeling. A couple of the project managers kept referring to his boat as their boat, because they sincerely believe that they overpaid him to install some roof drains.